Beyond the veil

It’s time for India to show its secular face – if it exists. The Supreme Court has ruled that if Muslim women wish to vote they must lift their burqas in order to be photographed for their voter ID cards, mandatory for those who exercise their franchise. The ruling has come following a petition arguing that requiring ‘purdah-nashin’ women to reveal their faces to strange men was tantamount to ‘sacrilege’ as it went against the tenets of Islam.

In its ruling the SC said, "If you don’t want to be seen by members of the public then don’t vote." The apex court further observed that as the right to stand for election is an extension of the right to vote, the burqa, in effect, externs women from the ambit of Indian democracy.

Many Islamic clerics and scholars have supported the SC ruling on the grounds of basic common sense — How can you identify a voter whose face is covered? — and argued that the burqa — like the Hindu ghoonghat which derives from it — is a cultural and not a religious tradition and as such can be waived when and where deemed necessary, as at immigration counter at airports, for instance. However, at least some hardliners have questioned the court’s decision: "In the name of liberating women, we cannot accept something which is against Islamic values."

The issue could become a litmus test for Indian secularism. Is it for real or is it just a charade? And the issue goes beyond the fate of the burqa and extends to the participatory nature of the debate. Will it — and indeed ought it — to be largely confined only to the Muslim community, for or against? Or should it involve wider participation, and be open to all citizens, irrespective of creed or gender? By its ruling the SC has made it a question of common concern, with a bearing on not just one community but on all those who share and believe in the country’s democratic polity.

However, the secular — or psuedo-secular, as its critics would say — view on such matters — be it the Shah Bano case or a common civil code — has long been that these issues should be left to the minority community concerned, to evolve its own solutions. Ostensibly a protection against a bullying majoritarianism, such special pleading is really a cop-out, an abandonment of secular responsibility that ensures that the minority community is further ghettoised and segregated from mainstream social and economic progress.

This soft underbelly of secularism — tellingly revealed by the mishandling of the Shah Bano case by Rajiv Gandhi’s government — exposes the false credentials of our supposedly politically correct liberalism. The hands-off, leave-it-to-them-to-sort-out-for-themselves argument then used — about the payment of support to divorced Muslim women — was that ‘outside’ intervention would be a transgression of minority rights. This specious argument totally ignored the rights of a more vulnerable minority within the Muslim minority: the minority of Muslim women. Ought liberal secularism not have espoused their cause, even at the risk of alienating the overall Muslim ‘vote bank’, as it is cynically referred to?

In France, which has the largest Muslim population in Europe, the hijab has been banned in government schools and offices, as it is discriminatory against women, whom it depersonalises and robs of the right to individuality. Such ‘hard’ secularism might not be possible, or desirable, in the context of what has been called India’s ecumenical secularism, which celebrates the plurality of all faiths and cultures. But the SC ruling is unarguably a step in the right direction of social and gender equity.

It’s time for Indian secularism — if it exists — to lift the veil from its own face.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Author

A former associate editor with the Times of India, Jug Suraiya writes two regular columns for the print edition, Jugular Vein, which appears every Friday, and Second Opinion, which appears on Wednesdays. He also writes the script for three cartoon strips. Two are in collaboration with Ajit Ninan, Like That Only which appears twice a week on Wednesday and Saturday and Power Point which appears on the Edit page of Times of India every Thursday. He also does a joint daily cartoon strip which appears online in collaboration with Partho Sengupta. His blog takes a contrarian view of topical and timeless issues, political, social, economic and speculative.

A former associate editor with the Times of India, Jug Suraiya writes two regular columns for the print edition, Jugular Vein, which appears every Friday, a. . .